Hanif Kureishi: Midnight All Day

There were scores of young actors being considered for the part. I recognise most of them, smoking, shuffling and complaining, in the line outside the audition room. I presumed we would be rivals for life but it was to me that the producer said, ‘It is yours if you want it!’

Waiting for Florence O’Hara on the train made my blood so effervescent that I speculated about whether I could have her in the toilet. I had never attempted such a caper, but she has rarely refused me anything. Or perhaps she could slip her hand under my newspaper. For days I have been imagining what pleasures we might make. We would have a week of one another before I went to Los Angeles for the first time, to Hollywood, to play a small part in an independent American movie.

With two minutes to go — and I was becoming concerned, having already been walking about the station for an hour — I glimpse her framed in the window and almost shouted out. To confirm the fact that we were going on holiday, she was wearing a floppy purple hat. Florence can dress incongruously at times, wearing, say, antique jewellery and a silk top with worn-out, frayed shoes, as if by the time she arrived at her feet she had forgotten what she had done with her head.

Behind her was her husband.

I recognised him from a wedding photograph I saw on the one occasion I popped warily into their flat, to survey their view of Hammersmith Bridge and the river. Florence had suggested I paint the view. Today, for some reason he was seeing her off. She would wave through the window at him — I hoped she would not kiss him — before sinking down next to me.

There is always something suspicious about the need to be alone. The trip had taken some arranging. At first, conspiring in bed, Florence and I thought she should tell her husband she was holidaying with a friend. But intricate lies made Florence’s hands perspire. Instead, she ascertained when her husband would be particularly busy at the office, and insisted that she needed to read, walk and think. ‘Think about what?’ he asked, inevitably, as he dressed for work. But, quietly, she could be inflexible, and he likes to be magnanimous.

‘All right, my dear,’ he announced. ‘Go and be alone and see how much you miss me.’

During the week before our departure, Florence and I saw one another twice. She phoned and I caught a taxi outside my front door in Gloucester Road. She put on a head scarf and dark glasses, and slipped out to meet me in one of the many pubs near her flat, along the river. There was an abstraction about her that makes me want her more, and which I assume would be repaired by our holiday together.

Her husband was walking through the train towards me. Despite having left the office for only an hour, he was wearing a cream linen jacket, jeans and old deck shoes, without socks. Fine, I thought, he’s so polite he’s helping her right into her seat; that’s something a twenty-seven-year-old like me could learn from.

He heaved her bag onto the rack and they sat opposite, across the aisle. He glanced indifferently in my direction. She was captivated by the activity on the platform. When he talked she smiled. Meanwhile she was tugging at the skin around her thumbnail until it bled, and she had to find a tissue in her bag. Florence was wearing her wedding ring, something she had never done with me, apart from the first time we met.

With an unmistakable jolt, the train left the station, on its way to our holiday destination with me, my lover and her husband aboard.

I stood up, sat down, tapped myself on the head, searched in my bag and looked around wildly, as if seeking someone to explain the situation to me. Eventually, having watched me eat the chocolate cake — on another occasion she would have licked the crumbs from my lips — Florence left her seat to fetch sandwiches. I went to the toilet where she was waiting outside for me.

‘He insisted on coming,’ she whispered, digging her nails into my arm. ‘It was yesterday. He gave me no choice. I couldn’t resist without making him jealous and suspicious. I had no chance to speak to you.’

‘He’s staying the whole week?’

She looked agitated. ‘He’ll get bored. This kind of thing doesn’t interest him.’

‘What sort of thing?’

‘Being on holiday. We usually go somewhere … like Italy. Or the Hamptons —’

‘Where?’

‘Outside New York. I’ll encourage him to go home. Will you wait?’

‘I can’t say,’ I told her. ‘You’ve really made a mess of everything! How could you do such a thing!’

‘Rob —’

‘You’re stupid, stupid!’

‘No, no, it’s not that!’

She tried to kiss me but I pulled away. She passed her hand between my legs — and I wish she hadn’t — before returning to her husband. I walked up and down the train before sitting down. It did not occur to me to sit somewhere else. Blood from her thumb was smeared over my arm and hand.

I had never seen her look this miserable. She is sometimes so nervous she will spill the contents of her bag over the street and have to get on her hands and knees to retrieve her things. Yet she can be brave. On the tube once, three young men started to bait and rob the passengers. While the rest of us were lost in terror, she attacked the robbers with an insane fury that won her a bravery award.

For the rest of the journey she pretended to be asleep. Her husband read a thriller.

At the country station, as I marched off the platform, I saw the hotel had sent a car to pick us up: one car. Before I could enquire about trains back to London, the driver approached me.

‘Robert Miles?’

‘Yes?’

‘This way, please.’

The bent countryman led me outside where the air was cool and fresh. The immensity of the sky could have calmed a person. It was for this that Florence and I decided, one afternoon, to get away.

The man opened the car door.

‘In you get, sir.’ I hesitated. He swept dog hairs from the seat. ‘I’ll drive as slowly as I can, and tell you a little about the area.’

He deposited my bag in the boot. I had no choice but to get into the car. He shut the door. Florence and her husband were invited to sit in the back. As we drove away the car bulged with our heat and presence. The driver talked to me, and I listened to them.

‘I’m glad I decided to come,’ Florence’s husband was saying. ‘Still, we could have gone up to the House.’

‘Oh, that place,’ she sighed.

‘Yes, it’s like having a third parent. You don’t have to keep telling me you don’t like it. What made you decide on here?’

I wanted to turn round and say, ‘I decided —’

‘I saw it in a brochure,’ she said.

‘You told me you’d been here as a child.’

‘Yes, the brochure reminded me. I went to lots of places as a child, with my mother.’

‘Your mad mother.’ In the mirror I saw him put his arm around her and lay his hand on her breast.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Just us now,’ he said. ‘I’m so glad I came.’

*

I am hungry.

At last I unstick my ear from the wall, shake my head as if to clear it, go downstairs, and have supper in the bar crowded with the local lushes, who prefer this hotel to the pubs.

I eat with my back to the room, a book in front of me, wondering where Florence and her husband are sitting and what they are saying; like someone sitting in Plato’s cave, trying to read the shadows. Halfway through the meal, having resolved to face them at last, I rise suddenly, change my seat and turn around. They are not there.

As I order another drink, the plump girl behind the bar smiles at me. ‘We thought you were waiting for some lucky person who didn’t turn up.’

‘There’s no lucky person, but it’s not so bad.’